Language
Country/Area
No result found
Blue Screen Mystery: What surprising changes will happen if you terminate services.exe?
In modern Windows operating systems, Service Control Manager (SCM) or services.exe is one of the core components of system operation. This process is responsible for starting, stopping, and interacting with various Windows services. Through this process, the system is able to manage all installed services and ensure that they start correctly in the preset order at boot time.
What kind of impact will it have on the system if this critical process is terminated?
The main function of SCM is to start all automatically started services according to the configuration. It initializes the service's internal database by reading a specific registry file and ensures that services are started in the correct loading order. If any of these services fail to start, they will be recorded in a list called ScFailedDrivers, which may result in limited system functionality.
In addition to basic service management, SCM has an additional feature that notifies GUI applications when network drives are created or deleted. This feature is especially important when using Windows Explorer to access network resources.
Service startup process
When the system boots, the SCM first executes the SvcCtrlMain() function and then calls ScGetBootAndSystemDriverState() to check whether all required drivers are loaded successfully. These drivers will be recorded in ScFailedDrivers for future reference. If services.exe is terminated, these checks will not be completed, resulting in the system being unable to ensure that all dependent services have been properly loaded.
Will terminating services.exe cause the system to fail to boot or cause a blue screen of death?
In addition, the SCM creates a named pipe as a communication interface between the SCM and the service control process (SCP), which is essential for the normal startup of the service. Whenever a service is started, the SCM creates a process for the service using CreateProcessAsUser(), which enables the service to run in a more secure context.
Design of delayed automatic start service
In order to improve the system startup speed, Windows Vista introduced the concept of delaying the automatic startup of services. This service is started after all other non-delayed-start services are processed. The main difference between a delayed auto-start service and a normal auto-start service is the start time, while there is basically no other difference between the two during execution.
Device Driver Management
When processing device drivers, the SCM calls ScLoadDeviceDriver() to load the corresponding driver, which is another key task relative to the service. This means that any interaction or driver issues with the hardware may also not be resolved due to the termination of services.exe, which will cause the hardware to not function properly.
If services.exe is terminated at this time, is there any chance to restart these failed drivers and services?
In general, terminating services.exe will have a significant impact on the stability of the Windows system. It will not only affect the startup of the service, but may also cause the entire system to enter an inoperable blue screen state. This raises a question worth pondering: Why can tiny system components have such a profound impact on the overall operation?
